Talking Point Strategy: If you can't support the Dems' bill, CALL IN and DO SOMETHING ELSE! Ideas:

[calimary]

If you can't honestly advocate full-on for the Democratic position, then do the OTHER thing, which is JUST AS USEFUL.

You get in there and, pardon the expression, start fucking things up in the enemy camp (because they ARE the enemy, make NO mistake about it).

NOTE: THIS IS A CALL TO BE PLACED TO A republi-CON. Yours, or ANY others.

Call up and say you're a longtime member of the GOP. And YOUR GOP, the Party of Lincoln, the party of adults, the party of respectable governance, the party you grew up with, the party of your parents and your family for several generations (you get the idea), IS LOOKING BAD!!!! The tea party is making us look BAD!!!!

Tell them: Everyone out here - OUTSIDE the Beltway - can see it and the congressional staffer you're talking to who picks up the phone and is taking your comments needs to hear this as the REALITY of the day.

Tell them: The tea party people are EMBARRASSING us! They're making us look BAD! I'm disgusted, and I'm a lifelong Republican and I just can't take this anymore. I thought WE Republicans were the party of "Country First"! And we're NOT. We've become the party of the extremists! Who care nothing about our country but only about party dominance and gamesmanship. And as a loyal American I want my congressman/woman to serve my COUNTRY FIRST, NOT just our party!

Tell them: I never thought I'd say this, as a lifelong Republican. I never thought it'd come to this, but I've thought about this for awhile now and watched all this nonsense and this increasing extremism, and I actually think it's time to get behind the President. I NEVER EVER thought I'd say that, but it's really come to this!

Tell them: Those tea party people are RUINING OUR PARTY! They're going to destroy our good Republican Party, turn us into a joke run by a bunch of yahoos, and they've pushed us into extremism like I've never seen before in all my life! They're making us look BAD, and pushing us into a position of not negotiating with strength! They're making us ALL look like nutcases!!! You (congressman/woman) have GOT to stand up to them because the longterm for us as a party is not good if they continue to run roughshod over everything. They're making us look HORRIBLE!!!!!!

Tell them: all we've seen over and over and over is - Obama is trying to compromise and we're seen as being so rigid and uncompromising. HOW DO YOU THINK THAT MAKES US LOOK, I mean, REALLY???? We're LONG PAST the point of looking "strong" and "secure in our convictions." Now we just look pigheaded and childish. Obama offers us everything we want and we STILL say no????? DO YOU REALIZE HOW THAT MAKES US LOOK?????


You don't have to tell them all of this, but these are just some sample talking points you could use. Use THEIR buzz phrases so you sound like one of them. Say "tea party" and not "teabaggers." Say "Republicans" and not "republi-CONS" or "assholes" or "repukes" or whatever they actually are that we call them derisively. NONE OF THAT, HERE.

This is PERCEPTION MANAGEMENT. MANAGE, and MANIPULATE the perception. Start fucking with their heads. You do realize there's a lot of this kind of opinion out there, as people get more and more disgusted with Congress and the polls CONSISTENTLY show that more Americans want the Democratic solution (raising taxes on the rich and the corporations, don't touch Medicare or Social Security) and the CONS have more bad numbers on their side than Obama or the Dems do. We should keep THIS in mind. You're not really telling an untruth here. You're just telling it from a - um - different side. You can help destabilize the enemy this way, and put him/her on shakier ground.

DESTABILIZE THE ENEMY. Cause and provoke and encourage the cancer and the poison to grow within their own ranks.

[calimary]

1. Kicking this!

[sarcasmo]

2. Right out of the CIA play book, kick.

[calimary]

6. Damn straight!

Hell, I've never seen any CIA play book, but I DO know that this is what the enemy does. And I don't see why we don't do it, too. We HAVE to go the gunfight with guns. NOT with feather-dusters - simply because of the flabby "argument" that - "oh, we can't do THAAAAAAAAAAT! That isn't who WE are! That makes us more like THEM!"

Sorry. FUCK THAT! This is WAR and WE NEED TO WIN. Because if you don't WIN, you don't govern. Look how much shittier things have become because the bad guys won in 2010. LOOK WHERE WE ARE NOW!!!!

[Critters2]

3. K&R nt

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. good going

[Fire1]

5. Too late! Their camp is already in disarray and they managed

it on their own!! LOL!! Priceless!!

[calimary]

7. Not so. If it were too late and they were already in that much disarray, we wouldn't even need

to have this argument. Because they'd be vanquished and we wouldn't be having this problem now.

Unfortunately, disarray or not, they're still VERY healthy and VERY viable and VERY alive 'n' kicking.

NO.

If indeed they are in disarray (and I'd agree with you there, they ARE in some degree of disarray), they're still quite capable of fucking everything up, aren't they? They're not in such bad disarray that they're immobilized yet, by ANY stretch of the imagination! THAT is the kind of disarray we need - the kind that completely immobilizes them and EFFECTIVELY prevents them from doing any more damage or getting their way anymore. We need to get in there and start aggravating the disarray. Pushing it along and feeding it and encouraging it - from two different directions. Do WHATEVER we can to increase their difficulty AS WELL AS decreasing their effectiveness.

[Fire1]

8. You can stop the hand wringing. As long as there is

cloture (look it up)this will not be a never ending battle and the country will not default.

[calimary]

9. That assumes that Harry Reid would take that step.

And if that were to happen, he'd have to do it IMMEDIATELY, if the Senate's going to stay in session. They have to deal with the built-in "ignore day."

The cloture petition is ignored for one full day during which the Senate is sitting. For example, if the petition is filed on Monday, it is ignored until Wednesday. (If the petition is filed on a Friday, it is ignored until Tuesday, assuming that the Senate did not sit on Saturday or Sunday.)<12>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloture

It also hangs on either a two-thirds or three-fifths majority depending on the circumstances. And even assuming you have enough votes. Our majority in the Senate isn't that large anymore. And allowing the required time for debate. And all kinds of other steps that could hold it up.

And they're running out of time. Their window of wiggle-room is closing. And it hasn't even been mentioned as any sort of even veiled trial balloon. Unless ol' Harry is planning it but keeping it VERY close to the vest.

On another point: I HARDLY call it hand-wringing. It's pro-active strategic thinking. Hand-wringing is when you're crazed with worry and just fussing and fretting AND wringing your hands without necessarily trying to figure out what to do about the problem OR out-n-out DOING IT. Pro-active strategic thinking means you're figuring out WHAT to do and HOW to do it, actually to solve the problem and not just worry it to death.

You'll usually find me in the "well, then, what do we DO about it" crowd, plotting realistic workable strategies. :D

[calimary]

10. Kicking this.

[calimary]

11. One more time!

[sabrina 1]

12. K&R

My Rep IS a Republican, not one of the really crazy ones, but I just moved here a year ago so I'm not all that familiar with him. My family here seem to think he's a pretty good guy. I will call him and ask him if he knows what the teapartiers are doing to the Repub party.

[calimary]

13. I would absolutely call some "r's", including your own.

I'd guess that, just by the law of averages, you're gonna have a FEW who aren't completely gone-over-the-edge, and they're probably chafing against this, especially if they really do pride themselves in their stands and what informs their points of view. Some of them are reachable, and/or eventually redeemable. I mean, there IS Walter Jones, R-North Carolina. He started out staunchly supporting bush's Iraq War. I think he may even have been so far into altered reality that he even joined in the ridiculous and embarrassing "freedom fries" schtick in the Capital lunchroom. And he changed. Now he's described as anti-war. SOME are reachable. They do exist. Yours may be open to reason. Who knows? And I would think that the added element of being made to look bad would certainly spur them to search for a way out.

NOBODY wants to look bad. It's politically life-threatening. If you look bad you're not taken as seriously and your credibility - and then your CLOUT - starts taking a hit, too. No one can afford that for long, in politics. You can't EVER be perceived as negotiating from a position of weakness! Damn - reminds me of something I learned back when I was still working. There's a good side and a bad side to being prominent. You may have a very cool highly-coveted job and it pays well and bathes your ego and and there are all sorts of other benefits and it enhances your own resume like gangbusters. That's the good side. The bad side is that - the higher you climb, the more of a target you become. And there'll be lots more people shooting at you. There'll be lots of people who are happy and respect you and how you earned or maneuvered your way there, but there'll be MANY others who hate your guts for the very nerve of you taking the job that's rightfully THEIRS! A guy like john boner is faced with that every second of his life since he became Speaker under the power that was added to his party by the frickin' teabaggers.

But they can be reached. Either with reason, OR with further evidence presented to them - that maybe they're outnumbered, and not being leveled with about how the public really feels. They're funded, coached, groomed, lobbied, and owned by wealthy interests with their own agendas - and why wouldn't those interests want to twist arms to get their way? So I bet they either ignore, or don't get to hear, the extent of the sentiment from the opposing side (OURS). If they start hearing from YOU and others like you who want to weigh in and remind them that they sure aren't acting in the spirit of their party's loud, blaring 2008 slogan "Country FIRST!" They need to hear this kind of complaint and reminder many many times! They need to be reminded that there's this OTHER side out there that's bigger than theirs, and more broadly-based than theirs, and angrier and more energized than theirs, but just not getting any exposure on Pox Noise. And the more they hear from people who feel as you do, the better the impact. Makes them feel like they're not representing some big single-minded CONservative block. "They're not all in agreement with you, Congresscritter. And there are more of those who disagree with you than you realize. And they're coming for you next year." Helps make them feel as though the walls are closing in on them. THAT can help soften their hard stance on such things as the crap they're all pushing now.

Hey, I believe at least some souls can be saved. But we're running out of time here, aren't we?

[sabrina 1]

14. You're right. I now they are not all crazy

Some of them are even decent enough people. But they never get heard and are rolled over constantly by the radical loons in their party. THEY need to do something to take back their party also. And I'm sure a lot of them feel that way right now.

I remember Walter Jones. The 'freedom fries' guy. But when the reality of the war hit him, when he saw the bodies coming home and he realized there were no WMDs, that he had been duped, he had the guts to admit he was wrong. I remember him joining with Dennis Kucinich to try to stop the funding for the war, I believe. He was such a surprise back then, but I really felt for him. He was sincerely distressed over having been so fatally wrong. He was after all, a human being.

Great post, Calimary. I will try getting through to a few of them on the other side. I agree with what you say, they are in a bubble and need to hear from real people for a change.